This time the occasion was because Mr Bunches bought the movie Inspector Gadget 2, a movie that shockingly we could not find in the store last week when he got to go get a toy, and which he therefore had to order off Amazon, to his great disappointment and the consternation of the Best Buy employees and shoppers who had to watch me try to console a (literally!) sobbing Mr Bunches in the middle of the store, while also wrestling with Mr F, who wanted me to buy him a Hershey's Bar, which ordinarily I would have done because even though they cost $1.59 (!) at Best Buy Mr F doesn't ask for much when we are at the store, so I try to indulge him on those little things, but we were not buying anything else at Best Buy that day, because (as noted) they had the lack of foresight to stock a copy of a 2003 direct-to-DVD movie starring French Stewart, and there was no way I was going to go through the tedious, always-45-minutes-long annoyance of checking out at Best Buy for a candy bar.
Why Mr Bunches wanted the movie on DVD is a mystery to me, anyway, as it's available on Netflix and he can watch it anytime he wants, at least until Netflix realizes it is using bandwidth to make available a movie that only Mr Bunches is ever watching and takes it off. Maybe Mr Bunches is worried that will happen, and wants to guarantee his God-given right to watch that movie whenever he wants. Or to watch it on a bigger screen than the laptop. Who knows?
It is directly because of Inspector Gadget 2 that we went to Dunkin' Donuts today around 6:30 a.m. There is a scene in the movie where the Chief is eating a jelly doughnut (donut?) from Dunkin' Donuts, and the box is prominently placed on the Chief's desk. Mr Bunches might be the single-most-susceptible-to-marketing person I have ever met. EVERY SINGLE COMMERCIAL EVER works on him almost instantly. I assume he gets that from me, as I rarely can watch a commercial without wanting the thing in the commercial, even if I am sometimes unsure what the commercial is selling. There is a car commercial that ran this last summer in which people do action-movie kinds of things in cars from whatever manufacturer made the ad, and each time I saw it I failed to register that it was a car commercial for at least the first 10 seconds, and instead wanted to see the movie it apparently was advertising. There's a part of me that still can't believe it wasn't for a movie.
So Mr Bunches watched the movie 2 or 3 times Friday and Saturday and by Saturday night had asked so many times whether we could, at some point in his life, go to Dunkin' Donuts to get jelly doughnuts that I finally gave up saying "Sure, some day," and said "We'll go tomorrow morning."
Which is how we ended up there, me and Mr Bunches and Sweetie and Mr F, and when it was our turn at the counter, Mr Bunches had already decided that everyone was getting jelly doughnuts. I had had my eye on a 'pumpkin pie' doughnut on the top shelf, but I felt like I couldn't let him down when he told the man behind the register:
"I want a jelly doughnut."
The man looked at me for confirmation, and I nodded. "How many do you want?" I prompted Mr Bunches, who told the man "Four."
And so we all got jelly doughnuts. We all didn't eat jelly doughnuts. Mr F and Mr Bunches poked the side, where the jelly is inserted, and Mr F laughed. Mr Bunches looked a little grossed out. He dabbed at the sugar with his finger and licked it, made a face.
I ate my jelly doughnut there in the shop, and we took the other three home. Later on, Mr Bunches asked me how to get the sugar off of them. I told him you can't, really, that it's part of what makes the doughnut. He looked dismayed, and gave it to me to eat.
Later on, about 6:30 at night, he said "Dad, you look hungry."
I was not.
But he got out the third jelly doughnut and brought it over. "Dad, are you going to eat it?" he asked. I took a small bite to make him happy and he pointed at the dimples on the top. "There were 9," he said. "Now how many are there?" We counted and he said "9-1 equals 8."
He was mathing me. Mr Bunches hates math, but here he was using math to get me to eat a third jelly doughnut in a single day!
Not that I needed much prompting. We worked our way down to zero dimples, and Mr Bunches was so thrilled by it that he wanted to do the fourth one but I promised him that we'd do that tomorrow, for breakfast, instead. He excitedly packed up the fourth one in a bag and put it in the 'fridge.
No comments:
Post a Comment